Against all odds, Norwegian Labour Party lawmaker Raymond Johansen managed to have an even more laughable freakout over President Trump’s accepting the gift of her Nobel Peace Prize from Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado than CNN’s Trump Deranged column examined here.
“This is incredibly embarrassing and damaging for one of the world’s most recognized and important awards,” Johansen wrote in on Facebook. “The awarding of the award is now so politicized and potentially dangerous that it can easily legitimize an anti-peace prize development. Unbelievable that she actually gave the award to Trump. What on earth is the Nobel Committee going to say?”
What??? The Nobel Prize politicized???
I know, we’ve been seeing a lot of Colonel Kurtz lately, but that’s because we are being bombarded by ludicrous leftist meltdowns like that one almost every day.
I warn you, however: it you try and are serious, I’ll may ban you for being dishonest, or too stupid to participate in an ethics colloquy.
Aaron Blake, a senior political reporter for Washington Post who hails from Minnesota (oh-oh!) authored this steaming pile of bias for, no surprise, CNN. The title: “Why Trump accepting Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize is no laughing matter.” Somehow, this Trump Deranged mega-hack argues that there is something sinister about the President of the United States accepting a sincere gift from a foreign visitor. The essay itself is the essence of Trump Derangement. It defines the warped thought processes whereby anything this President does is by definition wrong because he did it.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has explained, several times, why she handed over her Nobel Peace Prize to the President, saying, graciously, “He deserves it.” A very strong argument can be made that she’s right on the facts, but never mind: Blake jumps immediately to the worst imaginable appeal to authority: he notes in his second paragraph that Jimmy Kimmel, easily the most repellent personality on network television today, made fun of the award. The column, incredibly, manages to go down hill from there…
Part Iset some kind of Ethics Alarms record for reader disinterest, which I much admit, I don’t understand. These are all topics we have covered in some detail here over the last year, and the analysis of them by the alleged “newspaper of record’s” experts is, to say the least, perverse and revealing…yet the post’s first installment inspired just a single comment. Well, the Times’ take on the remaining issues are arguably worse. I find it fascinating, anyway. Here’s the rest of the highlights…
Can we save the planet?
It is embarrassing for a supposedly respectable news organization to frame an issue in such a hysterical and intentionally fear-mongering manner, which assumes one side of a debate is correct without reflection of nuance. The Times’ author on this topic, Farhad Manjoo, is a tech reporter, not an expert on climatology, so he has been given a platform to opine on something he doesn’t understand sufficiently to discuss reliably. On the topic of climate change, this is, sadly, typical. His article contains the kind of sentence midway through that would normally make me stop reading because of the bias, spin, hyperbole and mendacity: “During the Trump years — as the United States tore up international climate deals and flood and fire consumed swaths of the globe — unrestrained alarm about the climate became the most cleareyed of takes.”
There were no “climate deals,” just unenforceable virtue-signaling and posturing like the Paris Accords; the link between present day “flood and fire” and climate change is speculative at best, and unrestrained alarm is never “cleareyed,’ especially when those alarmed, like Manjoo, couldn’t read a climate model if Mr. Rogers was there explaining it. Then, after telling us that the Trump years were a prelude to doom, he says that since 2014, things are looking up. Much of what he calls “bending the needle” occurred under Trump.
Should the Philip Roth biography have been pulled?
This one is so easy and obvious that the fact that the Times thinks it deserves special attention is itself a tell. The answer is “Of course not!,” as an Ethics Alarms post explained. An absolutely competent biography was pulled by its publisher, W.W. Norton, never to be in print again, because its author, who had written other acclaimed biographies, was in the process of being “cancelled” for allegations of sexual misconduct toward women. I wrote,
“…[P]ublisher W.W. Norton sent a memo to its staff announcing that it will permanently take Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth out of print, as a result of allegations that Bailey sexually assaulted multiple women and also behaved inappropriately toward his students when he was an eighth grade English teacher.
If that sentence makes sense to you, The Big Stupid has you by the brain stem.
It apparently makes sense to the Times, although its review of the matter doesn’t answer its own question. Why not? This is also obvious: as journalists, the idea that what a writer writes should be judged by what a writer’s personal life has involved is anathema, but the Times’ readers are so woke that the paper would dare not say so. Integrity! Continue reading →
1. And speaking of Martin Scorcese movies, since Jerry Vale is alluded to in several of them…”The Irishman” has been viewed on Netflix by many of my showbiz friends, and most, while complaining about the film’s length, have declared the performances “brilliant.” This reaction, is, I think, bias at work, the so-called “halo effect.” It’s the same phenomenon I witnessed in the D.C. theater community, where certain actors, directors and big theater companies were routinely called “brilliant” in their efforts, when in truth, the exact same product presented by artists with lesser reputations would be shrugged off or ignored.
The three veteran stars of “The Irishman” are being praised by critics across the board, but in truth, with the exception of Al Pacino, they seem weary and channeling earlier, better performances. This is especially true of Joe Pesci, who shows none of the energy we associate with his best performances, and the script requires him to run the gamut of emotions, as the old joke goes, from A to C. He’s as old as Joe Biden, and looks and acts every inch of it, though his character is supposed to be younger. Scorcese has used tech wizardry to give De Niro a younger face when necessary, but it still sits on top of his 80-year-old body. and there is nothing in De Niro’s act that we haven’t seen over and over again (though not so much lately, as Bob has been collecting checks for bad movies in which he appeared to be “phoning it in”).
Pacino, as Jimmy Hoffa, is lots of fun as usual, but he doesn’t appear to be trying to be convincing as the mysteriously disappeared labor boss, who was 62 with he vanished. Pacino is 79. How could anyone call Pacino “brilliant” as Hoffa? Jack Nicholson was far more convincing in the film “Hoffa,” and Pacino isn’t significantly different than he was playing a Hollywood agent in “Once Upon A Time In America.”
It must be nice to reach that stage as an actor when you get paid big checks just to show up, like Marlon Brando in “Superman.” Especially if everyone is going to say you were brilliant.
2. And now for something completely stupid. This is remarkable in the dual category of incompetence in one’s chosen pursuit (theft) and unforgivable ignorance regarding social media. Arlando Henderson, 29, who worked for a bank in Charlotte, North Carolina, stole money from his employer’s vault at least 18 times, for a grand total of $88,000. He was apprehended and arrested after posting about his robbery hobby on Facebook, including posts showing his new Mercedes-Benz, and this one…
You know, if someone is this stupid, ethics alarms hardly matter…
3. Surely we are missing some crucial information here...The New York Giants, in the midst of a horrible season, fired veteran cornerback Janoris Jenkins last week. Why? He was engaged in an argument with a fan on social media who objected to Jenkins posting his personal stats after a game that his team lost, and wrote,
It is so premature at this point that it’s laughable, but there are articles all over the news media about the prospect of President Trump being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize if all goes well between the Koreas, and a nuclear ban results.
Senator Graham, the alternating-current Trump ally/critic, told Fox that the President would deserve the honor. Some oddsmakers put Trump at 10-1 to win right now. Is there any way President Trump could win the most prestigious of the international honors?
Here’s my answer: No!Never. If Trump was unequivocally responsible for ending world hunger, war, pestilence and death, the Nobel Committee—you know, the ones that gave the Peace Prize to Barack Obama for doing absolutely nothing other than talking and being the first black President—would disband before it would honor Donald Trump. it is so obvious now, or should be, that the ideological and personal animus toward Donald Trump no longer is moored to reality, truth logic, fairness or standards that have applied and still apply to anyone else. Anyone who says anything good about him risks being marginalized and ostracized professionally and personally. Anyone who attacks him or any positive contention regarding him is rewarded.
So I’m not voting in this poll. I am, however, curious to see what others think. Here, therefore, is a poll:
Not only were there real, deserving candidates for the prize. it is clear that they were passed over in a cynical effort to influence U.S. politics and policy. In his memoir entitled Secretary of Peace, Lundestad writes, “No Nobel Peace Prize ever elicited more attention than the 2009 prize to Barack Obama . . . Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake. In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”
By using Nobel’s honor this way, the committee devalued the award for all past and future recipients, no matter how deserving. Lundestad, meanwhile, shows that those who have controlled the most ethics oriented of major awards have no comprehension of ethics. His regrets about the award being given to an individual who had done nothing to earn it arise only from the fact that it didn’t work. Indeed it did not, as Obama drone-killed hundreds without due process, carried on illegal bombing in Libya, refused to act when Syria used chemical weapons, and generally practiced feckless, timid, principle-free politics in international affairs. That, however, was moral luck, and the argument is consequentialism. It would have been equally wrong to give the award to Obama if he had achieved real success in promoting world peace afterwards.
I want to be explicit that no one should hold Barack Obama responsible for this fiasco in any way. Awarding the prize was unfair to him as well. Nor should he have allowed the honor to influence his decision-making at any time during his Presidency. There is no evidence that he did.
Once an award has been given based on politics and ideology rather than merit, it is no longer an award, but a lie. The Nobel Peace Prize is meaningless, not because it was awarded unethically once, but because there is no evidence that it won’t be again, the next time the Committee thinks they can manipulate a nation’s leadership and policies.
I am going to be driving most of the day, and I wanted to have something worth reading (assuming anything here is worth reading, about which reasonable minds disagree) for you while I am prevented by life’s adventures from posting new commentary. I thought it might be instructive to re-post this, which was published at a time that few knew of Ethics Alarms’ existence. In light of all that has happened since, all we have learned, and all that I have written about the leadership of President Obama, it provides useful, and perhaps wistful perspective. I re-read it just now, wondering if I would write the same today, even knowing what I know now.
There are several ethical issues raised by the stunning announcement that President Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. More, perhaps, were raised by the reactions to it.
Imagine, if you will, that you are a cast member in a Hollywood movie of dubious quality. Personally, you think the director is in over his head and that the movie is an empty, pompous failure. To your amazement, however, critics like the film. It is a surprise winner at an international film festival, and the director wins the “Master Film-maker” prize. Are you outraged, or pleasantly surprised? Do you congratulate the director for the honor, or do you tell him he is an undeserving fraud? Do you feel pride for your own connection to the award—you were in the cast, after all—or do you feel resentment? I would think the answers to all these questions are obvious. The civil, fair…
It is so easy—and tempting—to dismantle Matthew Lynch’s jaw-dropping essay on the Huffington Post titled “12 Reasons Why Obama Is One of the Best Presidents Ever” that it is unethical, like shooting fish in a barrel. Nearly everything about the post is snicker-worthy, beginning with its timing: this is the equivalent of writing a paean to JFK the morning after the Bay of Pigs.
I have no similar reticence about slamming the Huffington Post for running such an embarrassing screed. If it was intended as satire (and I still think this is a possibility), the piece is incompetent, because when satire is so close to reality that readers can’t tell it’s satire, then it becomes a hoax. There is a possibility, I suppose, that the editors published this because Lynch’s glossy-eyed, alternate reality ravings were entertainingly absurd (they are not: they are tragic), but this would be cruelty, the equivalent of Sean Hannity’s practice of allowing an ignorant, usually poor and uneducated liberal caller to make a fool of herself, slyly impugning the intelligence of the entire American Left. Yet the Huffington Post is largely Obama-friendly: his obeisant media may finally be moving away from the President, but not that quickly. I think “12 Reasons…” was run because the editors believed the article had substantive merit, in which case, they should all be sent to the Home for Bewildered Editors. (It also may have been planted as link bait.)
If the post was run on its substance, then the editors failed their responsibilities in another respect: they didn’t check Lynch’s facts. His opinions and justifications for them may be Oz-worthy and his alone, but when he writes a flat-out misrepresentation like this… Continue reading →
The Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 requires the United States to withhold any form of aid from nations that use children in their armies, a clear human rights violation. President Obama waived the provision in 2010, as Samantha Power, then the National Security Council senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights, assured the media and the nation that “the waivers would not become a recurring event.” By the terms of the law, the President has to notify Congress that he is waiving it within 45 days of making the decision. Monday afternoon, with Congress on the eve of a government shutdown and knowing that any such announcement would be largely ignored by the public and the press, the White House press announced yet another waiver of the law The new Child Soldiers Prevention Act waiver applies fully to Chad, South Sudan and Yemen. Congo and Somalia received partial waivers.
Rigged awards destroy the integrity of all awards, and every time an award based on merit is transformed into a cheap Hallmark card that means no more than “We really think you’re swell!”, I pray that the next recipient refuses it on the grounds that the award is a sham. The classic example, of course, was the Nobel Peace Prize given to Barack Obama for no reason whatsoever, but Mariano Rivera’s 2013 Major League All-Star Game MVP Award was equally blatant. Continue reading →
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